Before we started making the rounds with our hat in-hand, we received the advice: “Acquiring customers is a hell of a lot easier than securing funding.”

Great advice, I remember thinking - from someone who hasn’t raised any money.  If only I’d listened.

For the past 4 months we’ve met with anyone who would grant us a sit-down, pitched our company at several events, and have generally done everything we could think of to make ourselves desirable to anyone with a buck to invest.   “Great technology,” we’ve heard.  ”Interesting space to operate,” we’ve been told.   “Come talk to us when you have more traction.”

And maybe they will.   But I have a sneaking suspicion that this may, instead, be a not-so-subtle way of saying: “When your customers are paying your bills and you no longer need our money, we’d love to talk with you.”

Fair enough.  Sometimes business is game where you learn the rules as you play.  But, man, what I’d give now to have had that message sink in 4 months ago.

Instead of having spent hundreds of hours putting spit an polish on yet another targeted slide deck illustrating how our business is going to break through the SMB firewall and actually land those coveted customers, I could have spent the same time and energy working one-on-one with the customers we actually do have to make our product even better for them.  I’ll take an evangelist over a promotion any day.

To have all of that time spent sitting in consultation with countless angels, attorneys and VC’s (oh my!) back —  to instead have invested that time in heads-down development of our top-five feature list — I can’t begin to imagine how much further ahead our application could be.

I don’t deny the networking benefits that we’ve accrued as a result of our efforts.  We’ve met a great number of people whom I’m sure we will be able to call on in the future.  Getting your name out there is sometimes the hardest part, and this time spent has certainly done that.

But in the end, we’ve invested a lot of time in talking — rather than doing — and that is time we will never be able to get back.

There’s no need for you to head down the same path.  Listen to those sage words:  ”Acquiring customers is a hell of a lot easier than securing funding.”

Usage-Based Pricing

We’ve been inundated with requests for this. We understand that every Bluyah user makes use of different features within the application and having a single monthly price for access doesn’t makes sense if you only need a handful of features.

Moving forward, the price you pay will be based solely upon how much you use the service. At a high level it’s pretty simple:

$5 a month and $0.50 per 1,000 views

So what does that really mean? Well, here are the details:

• To begin with, we’re going to deposit $10 of our own money into your account (just to get you started!).
• As you use the Bluyah service to render ad-hoc reports, or charts, or maps, or other things, we’ll deduct $0.50 for every 1,000 times you or another user views one of your creations.
• Each month there will be a small monthly fee of $5 deducted from your account.
• As time goes by, refill your account as needed by logging into your account and going to the My Account section.

To help you calculate what your potential usage fees may be under this new plan, we’ve put a handy usage calculator online.

Free Account is Fully Functional

This has been the biggest complaint from users of our free service. We’ve removed all restrictions on the free account. You now have the full range of features at your disposal. Have fun!

Daily Usage Chart

Given the new usage-based structure, we figured folks are going to want to see how much they’re actually using the service, so you’ll notice a new “Usage” section in My Account. The page will give you a summary of your usage to-date. Detailed usage charts will be coming soon.

As always, feel free to contact us at support@bluyah.com if you have any questions.
~ The Bluyah Team

“Tom has a tremendous depth of experience, particularly with early-stage companies,” said Richard Luck, Bluyah’s founder. “He’s been involved at the ground level with companies like Monet and TTM and knows how to navigate the waters in the infancy stages of development. Given his history – and success – with these groups, we are thrilled to have him on our team.”

Crowder has over 15 years of finance and accounting experience in the telecommunications and real estate industries. Prior to joining Bluyah, he served as Director of Finance and Business Development at Telecom Transport Management (TTM), a telecom start-up based in Seattle. Prior to TTM, Crowder was Chief Financial Officer of iPoint Networks, until its sale to Impart Networks, and was a founding team member at Monet Mobile Networks (formerly Burst Wireless), the first wireless carrier to deploy mobile broadband services in the United States.

Crowder holds a M.S. in Finance from Seattle University and a B.S. in Business Administration from The Citadel. He is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA).

About Bluyah
Bluyah provides cloud-based on-demand data transformation services for business and municipality IT teams, enabling them to dramatically decrease their development costs and speed up time to market of critical application enhancements.

###

Contact Information
Adam Plenkovich
206-518-3404
press@bluyah.com

For more information, visit http://app.bluyah.com

In this next screencast in the series, we present a overview on how to share connectors, with other users linked to the same account:

Deployment Date: July 11th, 2009

Release 1.1.1 introduces several new exciting features and fixes a handful of application bugs.  The application upgrade will be applied to production servers during scheduled maintenance hours on Saturday, July 11th, 2009.  

New Features:

Slicing: 

You’ve been requesting this feature since the day Bluyah launched — and it’s finally here!  Slicing is just our fancy name for the ability to apply filtering, sorting, and mathematical functions (COUNT(), SUM(), AVG(), etc.) to your data sets.

• To enable slicing capabilities, you need to first create your “Report”.  This will ensure that the structure of the data source is fully understood by Bluyah so that we can accurately enable the proper type of slicing.
• Once your Report has been created, go back into the report (via the Edit link) and click on the “Slice Data” link to the right of the report title input field.  This will bring up the Slicing Control Panel where you can define each of the filters, sorts, or functions to apply to your data set.
• A screencast further explaining Slicing will be coming soon. 
• [Tickets #9, #331]
   

Sharing: 

We’ve elevated the functionality of sharing several notches.  Now you have complete control over every aspect of how you share your Connectors with other users in your account.  

• If you created a database connection and you want to only share two tables and three database views with the guy sitting at the desk next to you, the intuitive drag-n-drop interface we’ve introduces will let you do just that.
• The sharing management interface is reached through several places in the application.  Or you can simply click on the “Sharing” link under the My Account section of the application.  
• A screencast further explaining Sharing will be coming soon.   
•  [Tickets #26, #203, #204, #337] 

Online Invoices:  

You can now get access to every invoice you’ve received from Bluyah through the application.  Simply navigate to the My Account section of the website, then click on the “Invoice” link in the top navigation bar.  

• This feature is only available to account “admins”.  This is usually the person who created the Bluyah account.
• [Ticket #305]
    

Better Feedback Loop:  

You’ve given us your feedback about needing a better way to … well … give us feedback — and we’ve heard you!   Thanks to the great folks at GetSatisfaction, and the wonderful drop-in feedback form they’ve created, we now offer a community-driven knowledge base that is powered by you.  

• Ask a question; Answer a question.  Report a bug; Offer praise.  You can now do it all by simply clicking on the “Feedback” tab conveniently located on the left-hand of the screen.  
• [Ticket #273]
• Remember: we always love hearing about how folks are using Bluyah to solve new and interesting data transformation problems.  So if you have done something particularly useful with Bluyah, please use the Feedback tab to share your solution with other users.  You never know who might be out there trying to figure out how to do exactly the same thing.

Bug Fixes:

• #267 - Report Title reset when dropping column from Report Edit screen : Fixed problem where the custom report title would ‘reset’ to the previous value if you removed from (or added a column back to) your report in the Report Edit screen.
•  #276 - NoMethodError (private method `format’ called for nil:NilClass) : Fixed problem where a generic (and completely unhelpful) error message would be displayed in the browser if a user attempted to view an Export for which the underlying Report had been deleted.  The error message now informs the user that the export is no longer valid and that they should contact the report owner if they feel they erroneously received this error.
• #285 - Handle behavior of deleted exports in Presentation : Related to #276 above, this fixes some bad behavior that would occur within the application if a Bluyah user deleted an export (eg: a map) that had been embedded in a Presentation.
• #286 - Generic Xml Reports/Exports only show one line of data :  Occasionally, reports based upon the “XML” connector type would only display the first row of data when rendered.  It was a wily little bug, but we tracked it down and squashed it.    
• #310 - Source RSS parse error : There is a known (and still open bug) when attempting to parse RSS feeds that contain multi-byte characters.  Given the usage of Bluyah to-date, we are not going to solve the multi-byte issue at this time.  
  If you have a compelling need to build reports/exports off of data sets containing multi-byte characters, please submit a request through the Feedback tab so we can discuss this further.   
• #308 - DB Hostname field (create/edit) is too short : It was brought to our attention that users attempting to connect to databases hosted on Amazon’s EC2 service could not make a connection because we didn’t allow enough characters for the hostname field within the DB create/edit form.  This has been resolved.  Build all of the EC2 databases you want - and connect to them via Bluyah!
• #322 - Google Spreadsheets not creating data sample : Google Docs connectors would on occasion not  grab a data sample from the spreadsheet when first creating a report.  This would cause the application to throw an error when users went back into the Edit the Report (though it did not affect any of the Report’s Exports.)  This has now been resolved.  If you load a Report in the Edit screen and do not see any data displayed, click on the “Refresh Data” button to re-fetch the data sample.

Oh yeah — you will notice that the look and feel of our homepage has been updated as well with this release.

Tell us what you think by logging in and clicking on the Feedback tab on the left of the screen.  We’d love to hear from you!

Yes.  This morning started off in typical fashion.

And it is probably because of this that I didn’t really pay attention when, later that morning as I was driving my oldest son to school, a car passed us heading in the opposite direction, flashing his lights wildly.

In hindsight, I remember seeing the car.  And I remember seeing the headlights flickering on and off.  And I vaguely remember thinking : “Hmmmmm…”  But not much more.

But then a second oncoming car came at us, the driver flashing the headlights.  Then a third.  By the time the fourth car approached I had run through all of the possible scenarios I could think of.  Did I have my brights on?  No.  Was something wrong with the front of my vehicle?  Didn’t seem to be.  Was there a speed trap up ahead?  I didn’t know — but of all the options presented this was the only one that made sense.

I immediately slowed to 5 under the speed limit and almost as quickly the driver behind me began expressing his frustration with my choice.  A quick honk of the horn was not enough.  He gave us several — just in case we missed the point.  And at the first opportunity he sped past us, flashing us the “You’re #1″ sign as he went by.

Copyright Hannes Steyn

I’ll admit it.  At times like these I really wish vehicular assault was an acceptable response.  Not that I wanted to do the guy any bodily harm — but I really would have loved to see the expression on his face as that tinny little horn of his was wrapped around a tree.

It was almost as sweet as actually seeing him flagged over to the side of the road by a cop with radar gun in hand as we came around a sharp corner a little further up the road.

So what does any of this have to do with running a company?

A lot, I think.   Or at least more than I had previously thought.

The experience I’ve garnered so far has shown me that it’s very easy to get drawn into the “routine” of running the business.   Bills get paid on the 5th of the month.  Payroll gets run every other Monday with checks going out on Friday.  Standing status meetings every Monday at 9:30.   Advisory Board meetings.  Invoice runs.   Feature releases every third week.  The list goes on and on —  ad nauseam.   I can get so caught up in running the business that it becomes easy to forget to actually manage the business.

What do I mean by manage?

For me, this is simply heeding the warnings of the flashing lights as they cruise by.  This is taking the time to sit with Sales and actually hear to what is being said about the deficiencies in the marketing message — and then trying to get them resolved.   This is keeping an eagle eye on the checkbook and ensuring that we delay until the last possible moment every expense we can — if only so we have “just a little more” working capital.  This is ultimately having the stomach to admit that we may have embarked upon a mission that no one —  and I mean no one —  but our own small team seems to really “get”, and making the decision to stay the course and stick with our guns, staying true to our mission, our values and our future, when everyone else is trying like hell to convince us that we should become something we know in our hearts we are not.

This means giving the team every possible thing they need to succeed while removing (or circumnavigating) every possible roadblock to that success.  We’re going to take our lumps along the way, I know that.  There will be critics we encounter along the way with their own version of the “You’re #1″ salute.  And there will be competitors we’ll vehemently pursue (Crystal Reports — we’re coming after you).  But in doing so we won’t veer from our objective.  In the end we’ll simply stay the course.  We’ll do what we believe to be right.  And we’ll get to where we’re headed.

Of this I am certain.

We have a few — and by Monday evening they will all have been addressed.  They will have to be.  Our future depends upon it.

I can’t tell you the number of entrepreneurs I’ve spoken with who are “winging it.”  They have (admittedly) a great idea.  They have the skills to transform that idea into tangible form.  But they lack any type of dedication to the business of managing their business.   I don’t know if it’s due to the 5 years I’ve spent running DiMax, or if I’m just ultra-paranoid about having to go out and find a real job if this venture tanks, but I obsess over what I call the “5 C’s” of our business:

1.  Cost: I can’t stress this one enough.  If we don’t know this we will never make money at our business.  Sure, we may earn revenues, but we will never make money.  There’s a huge difference between the two — and if you are like I was five years ago and don’t understand that subtle but very important difference I’d suggest turning off the computer immediately and reading any one of the countless books on the subject.  We absolutely must know our costs: per unit, incidental, recurring vs. non-recurring, etc.  It is fundamental to making money and therefore has to be fundamental to our business.  As was famously pointed out via the dot.com meltdown nearly 10 years ago, you can not turn a per-unit loss into a profit through volume no matter how hard you try.
2. Capitalize:  This is the other size of the cost coin.  Actually, it is the coin.  We have to be able to capitalize on our vision.  Which, put bluntly, means we have to have a product and we have to sell it.  Which means we have to offer that product at a price-point that our customers will be willing to pay (what the business books call “value for value”).  David Hansson made a great speech about charging for your product.  I’ll paraphrase:  If you don’t have a price for your product, making money is difficult.  And if you can’t make money, staying in business is even harder.  
3. Consistent:  This really means nothing more than “we’ll do what we say we will, when we say we will do it.”  We’re like Mutual of Omaha:  we’ll be there when you need us, we won’t change direction on you mid-stream, and if you need someone to lasso that grizzly bear, we can accommodate. 
4. Containment:  This really could be called “Scope” — but I wanted to use a “C” word.  And “containment” is more precise.  What it means is that we need to have a deep understanding of our product and be willing to fight each and every day preserve it’s nature.  We must resist the urge to be “everything to everyone” because if we do in the end we will be “nothing to no one.”
5. Cushion: Finally, we need to give ourselves enough leeway to learn from our mistakes.  We have to provide enough cushion in the sales projections so that we’re not completely out of cash if we miss one month’s goals.  We need enough cushion in the test cycle so that if we discover that the app behaves differently on the cloud than it did on the dev box we have time to identify and correct the issue.  When we don’t use the cushion we’ve alloted, we’re that much further ahead.  And if we do use it …. well, we’re in-step with our goals, not behind them.

This may seem like a lot to obsess over, but like I said: our future depends upon it.  

The more precise we are with our written financial goals, the less room we have for ambiguity.   And the less room for ambiguity there is, the greater the chance we’ll hit our targets.  Because we actually know what we’re aiming for.

Don’t get me wrong —  I don’t begrudge any of them one iota.  I wish them the best of luck.  And I fully believe that within the next two to three months (or four), we’ll be sitting pretty right beside them, having attracted the right investor(s) who believe as much in our vision for Bluyah as we do.  But all of that good will and optimism about our own future doesn’t change the fact that recently I’ve been feeling …. well ….  a bit “stuck.”

Watching my boys play outside this evening, it finally dawned on me exactly what I’ve been feeling “stuck” about.  

You can play after your chores are done

From the first through the third grade, we lived next-door to a family with 8 children.  Their 4-bedroom house sat on about 2 acres of property right in the middle of a subdivision of smaller houses on quarter-acre plots.  The family grew all of their own food in a massive garden, had chickens for their eggs, a cow for milk, and a pig —  I’m not making this up —  named “Bacon.”  Needless to say, the family was a bit of an oddity in the community.  And the middle son, Alan —  who happened to be my age —  was my best friend.

Every day after school a gang of us would tear home on our bikes, check in with our mother’s, then disappear into the nooks and crannies of the neighborhood, exploring every square inch of that desert town before the sun began to set and a gaggle of moms would begin calling us in, one-by-one, for dinner from the front porches.

And nearly every day after school, Alan would check in with his mother only to hear: “You can go out and play when your chores are done.”  In all of my recollections, I can’t seem to ever remember him being outside with us on any day except Saturday (the younger boys of the family were excused from chores on Saturday afternoons).

Seeing my boys playing outside this evening it finally hit me:  I think I now know what Alan must have felt all those years ago, watching the other boys tear off on their bikes while he went off to the chicken coop to gather up eggs.

The Uncertainty of Support

I’ve mentioned it before.  Currently, we pay our bills by doing custom development work for local companies. It’s a great way to fund development of our Bluyah application.  And it introduces us to facets of IT and all that that entails in a way that under other circumstances we would not have the opportunity to witness.  In short — it reinforces on a near-daily basis the need there is for an application like Bluyah.

But having an on-going service contract, or an on-demand support agreement with a set of customers has a way of skewing your priorities.  In short, your customers’ priorities become, as they should, your priorities.  And their emergencies become your emergencies.  And your development cycle — when push comes to shove — takes a back seat to your client’s development cycle.

Jon, one of our rock-star developers, often jokes about having to “do the chores” whenever I assign him a client development task.  And he’s right.  They are chores.  The work needs to be done — and be done well — but they are chores nonetheless.  In essence, we’re stuck inside doing all of the necessary work for our clients so we can keep the lights on and the Bluyah development cycle moving forward while, it seems, all of the other Seattle start-ups are outside playing in the sun.  If I were eight again I’d probably scream “It’s just not fair!”  

But I’m not.  

I’m 41.  I’m about a decade older than most of the other CEOs making pitches to the VCs.  I’m reinventing our company (and, I would suspect, myself to a certain extent) at an age when most people are settling in.  I’m doing my damned best to run a company that I think has a serious shot at making a meaningful impact.  And at this stage of our young start-up life, as far as I can tell,  that means that we have to do everything in our power to ensure we get to keep playing the game.  

And that means: until an investor aligns with our vision for Bluyah, we’ll keep doing our chores.

Monday Morning Huddle

We do it every Morning at 9:30.  Don’t bother calling at this time - we won’t answer the phones.  It’s an “All Hands” meeting and the agenda is dead-simple.  Each person in the company talks about what they did last week, what they are planning on doing this week, and any roadblocks to success they may face.  We order it by Department as follows:

1. Sales and Marketing.
2. Development and Production Support.
3. Financial and Executive

The goal is to keep the meeting to under 30 minutes.  With only 5 people currently, we’re usually able to keep it under fifteen.

Running the meeting this way accomplishes several key goals:

1. Every member of the company knows at a high-level what is going on with every other group in the company. 
2. There is no ambiguity about what we as a company are working on, or what our priorities are for the coming week.
3. Everyone is aware of any roadblocks other individuals may be encountering and can provide insight or assistance.

Like I said, we do this every Monday.  So, the obvious question becomes: what did you all discuss today?  Here are the highlights.  Just a warning: I won’t name companies we’re talking with here for all of the obvious reasons.

Today’s Meeting Notes:

Sales Stats: Adam had several meetings last week with potential clients, one with a potential strategic partner.  DEV needs to provide an estimate on integrating with potential partner’s product before we can move forward on licensing negotiations.  3 sit-down meetings planned this week.  Needs to make more phone calls and emails to “fill the hopper.”   Sees a trend emerging in discussions: companies want to see more analytical capabilities in the tool.

Development Stats:  Dev just finished up code for client release (we do custom development for various companies to fund our product development).  Currently prioritizing development activities for Bluyah.  It was to be: Sharing, Online Invoices and XML Post processing - but given feedback from Sales, release 1.1.1 will now be:

1. Connector and View/Spreadsheet Sharing
2. Online Invoices
3. Pre and Post Filtering, sorting, basic analytics (to include much improved charting capabilities)

Financial Stats: It looks like an SBA loan is out of the question - we have no tangible assets to put up as collateral, and even if I put my house up, the loan amount we could get is well below the financing we need to execute on Phase I of our business plan.  CFO has a talk with a major local bank this week to talk about other loan options.   Additionally, we’re assembling a list of Angel Investors to whom we have referrals.  We need to finalize the Go-To-Market plan before we can call this group, however.  Which means we need to know a whole hell of a lot more about our pricing model margins and associated costs when under stress.  Follow-up meeting scheduled later in the week to work through break-points in the revenue model.  Lastly - as much as we hate to do so - we simply can not financially afford to execute on the excellent marketing plan that was presented to us by a colleague last week.  It’s up to me to figure out how we can get them to deliver the Marketing materials in “phases” that can coincide with when we hope to see the first round of financing.   I always get the fun jobs.

Case in point: Pif Magazine (www.pifmagazine.com).  

Pif Magazine has been online for nearly 15 years now.  It is one of the oldest, continually published literary journals on the Net.  It has published original works by well-known authors like Julia Slavin, Amy Hempel, and Poet Laureate  David Lehman.  It has also introduced countless unknown, previously unpublished authors and poets who have, because of their exposure in Pif, gone on to land contracts with traditional publishers.

In short, it’s an important venue with a very dedicated following.

One thing it is not, however, is technologically up-to-date.  The content management system used by the editorial staff is a highly customized version of PHP-Nuke 5.2 (codenamed: SIDney), which was deployed in the spring of 2001 and, save a few minor visual enhancements, has not been upgraded since.  It may sport a robust publication contracting system, but it lacks basic modern features. 

So when the editorial team recently asked me to add RSS capabilities to the site so they could syndicate the newly published articles, my first reaction was: “Well, there goes my weekend.”  Then, just as quickly I realized: “Hey - I can do this in Bluyah in about 3 minutes.”

Step 1: Getting the Data

This first step is always the most difficult.  Every application has it’s own database schema and SIDney is no different.  Only with SIDney, the schema is complicated by the fact that author information is (for historical reasons) stored in a separate database from article information.  In addition, the author’s email address is stored in a separate table from the author’s first and last name.  Just to complicate matters even more, the SIDney application allows editors to control things like title wrapping with special comment tags.  

To work around all of these inconveniences, I decided that the easiest way to gain access to all of the data bits I needed for an RSS feed would be to create a database view against the articles database and then point Bluyah at this view.

The view structure looks similar to this:

CREATE OR REPLACE SQL SECURITY INVOKER VIEW PIF_RSS_VIEW AS
SELECT
    CONCAT('http://www.pifmagazine.com/SID/',s.sid) AS link, 
    REPLACE("<!--titlebreak-->"," ") AS title,
    REPLACE(REPLACE(s.hometext,"\\'","'"),'\\"','') AS description, 
    s.pubdate,
    t.topictext, t.topicname,
    us.username as email,
    CONCAT(ui.fname,' ',ui.lname) AS author,
    ui.city, ui.state, ui.zipcode
FROM ARTICLE.stories s
    JOIN ARTICLE.topics t ON (s.topic=t.topicid)
    JOIN USER.user us ON (s.uid=us.uid)
    JOIN USER.userinfo ui ON (us.uid=ui.uid) 
ORDER BY s.pubdate DESC
LIMIT 20

Once the database view was defined and created, the rest was a snap.

Step 2: Connecting to the View

In Bluyah, I already had a Database Connection created for the Pif Magazine database.  I just needed to “discover” the newly created view and user it in a report.  To discover the view, I went to the Connect tab, found the already existing connection, then clicked on the “List DB Tables/Views” link in the Action column:
This will bring up a list of all tables and database views in your database.  Finding the newly created view, I clicked on the link “Use in New Report” in the Action column:

This brought me to the Report Create screen that you’re already familiar with from other posts.  Being that the view already contained the column names I wanted to see in my report, I simply clicked the Create Report button and went straight to the Export tab.

Step 3: Creating the RSS Export

I spent the most time on this screen trying to decide what to input into the free-form fields:

Everything on the left-hand side of the screen describes the feed itself, while everything on the right-hand side of the screen describes the individual listings in the feed.  As such, everything on the left-hand side of the screen will need to be provided by you when you create the RSS export.  Don’t worry - if you don’t like what you’ve input into the fields you can always come back later and update them.

For the most part, you can see that the database view I created contained field names very similar to what they would map to in the RSS Item screen.  I did this on purpose to speed deployment - but you could name your columns anything you want to and simply map them to the RSS Item attributes as appropriate on this screen.

Step 4: Embedding in the Website

Once the RSS Export was created, I pointed my browser at the URL Bluyah provided by clicking on the “Get Link” link in the Action column:

As you can see, the results are a standard RSS feed:

     https://richard.bluyah.com/export/rss/89387b6026e5012c6ef9002241319b39

Rather than use the IFRAME embed code provided by Bluyah (above) I decided I wanted a simple RSS icon hyperlinked to the feed instead.  If you checkout the homepage of Pif Magazine you’ll see the feed icon at the top-left of the screen.  

Final Thoughts

To me, the speed at which this feature was deployed to Pif is absolutely amazing.  Rather than spend 2-3 days writing an RSS feed generator into the code base (including testing and deployment), I spent a little over 10 minutes creating the database view, another 2 connecting to that view through Bluyah, creating the report and RSS export, and finally another 2 minutes embedding the RSS image with hyperlink to the RSS feed into the side-nav of the website.  All total, it was less than 15 minutes from “soup to nuts”.  In terms of development costs, the magazine just saved itself roughly $500 - and turned around the feature far quicker.  What could be better?

This release introduces a major new feature: Presentation exports.  More details, as well as a screencast, detailing how to use Presentations will be coming shortly.

Contents of the release are as follows:

• Sharees are no longer allowed to disable a database view from being used by all users in the account when that connector is shared to them. [Ticket #205]
• Sharers can now limit sharing to specific database views or Google Docs spreadsheets, without the need to share the connector itself.  In addition, connector sharing has been moved from the Connector Edit screen to the DB Views/ Google Spreadsheets Details page, in order to be more intuitive.  [Ticket #203]
• Enhanced the Professional and Enterprise accounts so that all communications with Bluyah are over SSL for these account levels. [Ticket #40]
• XML Connectors now allow optional username and password.  So if you wanted to connect to your Twitter account timelime, you could do so with Bluyah, then export that data into any export format you choose. [Ticket #224]
• Fixed bug in Map Export that would prevent 1st item in pop-up bubble from being displayed if the element name contained a space. [Ticket #268]

• Generic XML Connectors (I can hear the applause).  This has been our most-requested connector type for the past 3 months and we can say it’s finally a reality.  To walk you through how you connect to an XML feed and configure it for reporting, please see the excellent video tutorial Mike has posted.  It should answer all of your questions.
• Report against Database Tables.  Up until this release, DB Connectors only discovered pre-defined database views.  Now we’ll show you any tables you have in your database as well.  Report away!  [Ticket #216]
   
• Fixed an issue where charts would time-out if non-numeric data was encountered.  [Ticket #84]
• Column sorting has been added to Connector, Report and Export lists.  This allows you to more quickly find the item you’re looking for via sorting by name, date, or source. [Ticket #125]  
• Better visibility to default Exports.  Did you know every report you create can, by default, be exported to html, xml or csv format?  No?  Well, not to worry, we’ve now made the URLs for each of those formats easier to find.  Just navigate to the Export tab and you’ll see what we mean. [Ticket #179]

• Fixed a problem where creating a new Marquee could throw a fatal error if created against an RSS feed that contained no data. [Ticket #198]
• Fixed an issue with charts where IE users (gotta love IE!!) were not able to view or edit any charts. [Ticket #212]
• Hardened all of the Exports to better inform the user if they were attempting to render an export against a deactivated (or deleted) report. [Ticket #85]
• In a related issue, changed the list display for Reports and Exports to highlight those items where the underlying data Connector had been invalidated.  This should make it easier for users to know when a connection to their data source can not be made (Feed went away, or DB password is no longer valid, etc.).  [Ticket #208] 
• Added logic to the Report create/edit screen to prevent users from creating a report with a name that is already in use. [Ticket #187]
• All exports in the Export list now contain a direct link to their underlying report.  This should make it easier for you to make tweaks to the right report, if needed. [Ticket #126] 
• Added better messaging to the Google Docs parser to inform users if their underlying spreadsheet is in a format that can not be understood by Bluyah (hint: All reportable columns MUST have a column name in row 1).  [Ticket #214]
• Added support for Microsoft SQL Server database Connector.  This has been a much-requested feature - so have at it. [Ticket #111]  

Just to keep everyone up to date: DB2 and PostgreSQL database support is coming soon.  We’re still running through all of the test cases, so thanks for your continued patience.   We will let everyone know via Twitter when we have settled on the actual launch date.  You are following us on Twitter, right?